Selling photos across agencies

What camera do you use? I’m reading this question quite often. Both in general photography groups but also in stock photography groups.

Let me tell you what I use to shoot images. But if you are really interested in the answer to your question, make sure you’ll read this post until the very end.

Be reminded that I am mainly a stock photographer with a focus on concept, city, architecture and the occasional people images, for someone focusing on beauty portraits or producing gallery prints the results might look different.

Hey there. I know I have made myself very available for the past few years. And I am really happy and honored that my reach has grown so far. Thanks a lot for reading what I had to say. However, this came with a backside: From the usual one or two questions a month, I am now getting personal messages or emails almost daily, sometimes several each day. I simply don’t have time to answer each of them individually.

I have been writing this blog for four years, I have mentioned EyeEm a lot of times but so far I did not have a single article dedicated to them. That’s something totally uncalled for since they turned out to be one of the places that make good money for me month after month. In the first four months of 2017 alone, the royalties I received through them added up to $1,254.93 and I actually have some hopes this will continue to improve.

For some time now, and especially last year, there was a series of complaints brought forward by contributors about others pushing their serial images into searches and such blocking existing and other new content coming in. There certainly has been merit to those complaints, and it is most likely a difficult task to address this kind of problem. But Shutterstock’s reaction this week came rather out of the blue with the reviewing team actually rejecting images before even the blog post on the issue was published. Also it seems that the rejections at this point are far too extreme to make sense for either contributors or buyers.

Yesterday, Getty has uploaded the first sales report for iStock contributors into their ESP platform. As I explained in a blog post, it is the most terrible way to present data I can imagine. The PDF you can download contains all sales but it was probably designed in a time when the best stock photographers would get 100 sales a month, each paying $50-100, it doesn’t really make sense to go through dozens of pages for hundreds of subscription downloads. The TXT file you can download contains all the details, so there is a lot of information in there but about 80-90% of the spread sheet is unusable information, the formatting isn’t what I would call industry standards, so it isn’t really easy to get a good overview of what you sold. I tried to turn it into readable information for myself to get a better overview of what I sold and for how much.